f4u038krapl

Back in the days before the modern convenience of refrigeration, this is how people keep their food (read: their beer) ice cold. Men would harvest blocks of ice from frozen lakes and ponds with a horse & plow and giant saw. Workers would then load the slabs of ice into a spring house or an icehouse to sell to people for use in their ice boxes at home.

If you’re getting or giving a new MacBook during the next couple of days, then grab Mac app Hidden, which provides a number of theft prevention services. Now until January 2011, the app is free. All you need to do is register, download and install.

This is the mindset of the ambitious educational elite: You go to Harvard (or Stanford), maybe to Oxford (or Cambridge) for a Rhodes (or Marshall), then to Goldman (or McKinsey, or TFA), then to Harvard Business School (or Yale Law School), then back to Goldman (or Google), and on and on. You keep doing the thing that is more prestigious, opens more doors, has more (supposed) impact on the world, and eventually will make you more and more famous and powerful. Money is something that happens along the way, but it’s not your primary motivation. Then you get to Peter Orszag’s position, where you can do anything, and you want to go work for Citigroup? Why do our society and culture shape high-achieving people so they want to be executives at big, big companies that are decades past their prime? Why is that the thing people aspire to? Orszag wanting to work at a megabank — instead of starting a new company, or joining a foundation, or joining an NGO, or becoming an executive at a struggling manufacturing company that makes things, or even being a consultant to countries with sovereign debt problems — is the same as an engineer from a top school going to Goldman instead of a real company. It’s not his fault, but it’s a symptom of something that’s bad for our country.

The limited edition Porcupine Cabinet is designed by Sebastian Errazuriz and features independently controlled slats that can be moved in multiple positions to accommodate anything that it might contain.

Free writing has its place, but I find that adding just a bit of structure to your writing process can help to improve what you eventually end up with. This is especially important when you’re writing for clients.

“Flipboard is perfect for the audience it targets and truly it doesn’t surprise me that someone like my Dad uses it. The problem is that the casual browsing nature of FlipBoard is just wasted time for a power user that knows what they are looking for.”